A really minimal WordPress theme – Part 1

Did you ever wonder what are the really minimum requirements for a theme to be recognized by WordPress?
Prepare to meet a Really Minimal WordPress theme!

Really Minimal is actually made of one directory and two empty files in it! Yes, empty, as long as they are named correctly. That’s it!

The directory, placed under wp-content/themes, can take any name. For this example we will call it really-minimal (what else?)

Inside the really-minimal directory, create two files named style.css and index.php respectively. The two files do not need any content, they can just be totally empty and WordPress will be perfectly fine with that.

Now login into WordPress, go to Appearance –> Themes and you will find your new theme listed among the available ones. You can even Activate it. You will not see much if you do (well, nothing at all actually), but hey, good job!

Here is your really minimal theme as it appears among the other available WordPress Themes:

In order to display our theme in the Themes administration screen and not having other available data, WordPress uses the directory name as a theme name. It also displays “Anonymous” as the author. Clicking on Details shows an empty “Version:” and no description at all.

The Live Preview actually works (even if the screen is totally blank) and, surprisingly enough, the Customizer also works showing two options: “Site Title & Tagline” and “Static Front Page”.

It is also possible to Delete the newly created theme by pressing the Delete button (not a big loss I would say!)